The present invention relates generally to a method for developing graphical user interfaces for Computer Telephone Integration CTI applications.
Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) enables a computer system to control a telephony system and a telephony system to access to a computer system. While the existing CTI development methods are often robust, a shortcoming of the existing CTI development methods is that they are difficult to use to develop end user CTI interfaces, because they require developers and integrators to understand the details of how a particular telephony system and CTI system operate internally. A main contributing reason to such a shortcoming is the lack of an accepted standard for telephony integration, which has led to the development of several proprietary and non-proprietary interfaces to the various telephony hardware vendor platforms.
At the current time, ActiveX is an effective platform to develop graphical user interfaces for CTI applications. ActiveX is a software technology developed by Microsoft(copyright) for object oriented development of reusable software components. In a CTI application developed on an ActiveX platform, the application may need to collect and display textual information while the software components are interacting with a telephony system. In a conventional graphical user interface developed on ActiveX platform, customer code has to be developed to interact with a CTI server to collect information from the CTI server and display this information in respective text objects. Writing this code requires developers and integrators to understand the details of how a particular telephony system and CTI server operate internally.
Therefore, there has been a need to provide a method for designing software components for CTI solutions, which is easy to use by CTI system developers and integrators.
There has been another need to provide a method for collecting textual information and displaying it in text objects, without requiring the knowledge of details of telephony systems and CTI servers, thus simplifying and improving the efficiency of CTI application development and maintenance.
The present invention meets these two needs.
In one aspect, the invention provides a method for displaying information generated from a communication management system. The method comprises the steps of:
(a) creating an object image symbol;
(b) defining a behavior for said created object image symbol without requiring writing programming code; and
(c) collecting the information from the communication management system and displaying the information with said object image symbol.
In another aspect, the invention provides a method for inputting information from an application to a communication management system. The method comprises the steps of:
(a) creating an object image symbol;
(b) inputting the information into said object image symbol; and
(c) collecting the information from said object image symbol and sending the information to the communication management system.
Still in another aspect, the invention provides a method for inputting information from an application to a communication system, and for creating an entry in the communication management system and sending the information to the created entry. The method comprises the steps of:
(a) creating an object image symbol in the application;
(b) inputting information into said object image symbol;
(c) creating an entry in the communication management system; and
(d) collecting said information from said object image symbol and sending said information to said entry.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent from the following description and accompanying drawings.